Minimum wage hike brings dignity?

The city of Eau Claire is now joining the 'in' crowd and looking at raising the minimum wage in the city. Not much of a new story their; since bleeding hearts in the city of Madison started looking at raising the city minimum wage, local politicians all over the state have started jumping on the bandwagon. What makes this story different, though, is this little snippet:

A higher minimum wage would bring dignity to some people’s lives, allowing them to earn enough to eat and find a good place to live without public assistance, said council member Kerry Kincaid.

What? This would "bring dignity" to people's lives? I don't think it will. Ignoring the ripple affect something like this would have on small businesses and the number of people they could afford to employ, let's look at it this way. This minimum wage employee will gross an additional $3848 a year. That's about $320 a month, gross. $320 (gross) a month does not buy a whole lot more dignity. What about the dignity of those people who started out in a minimum wage job and worked very hard to get themselves good job reviews and raises over the years. Suddenly they find that they are minimum wage employees again, or that all of their hard work means that they are $.15 above the minimum wage, above people who are coming into entry level jobs with no experience what so ever. I know a person who in the early 1990's entered the job market later in life, and she worked hard to get herself up to a nicer wage, and every time she started to feel proud of her work, the minimum wage was raised and she found herself making what entry level workers made all over again. There was no pride in that. It did nothing for her "dignity". It gave her no desire to work hard and get ahead.

There are some very principled arguments against raising minimum wages. This is not meant to be one of them. This was an argument against a stupid statement by a local politician.